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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


On My Blog Menu:

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USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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Tuesday, March 5, 2002
01:15 - The Topic That Dare Not Speak Its Name
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020311/story.html

(top) link
It's been called "The New York Nuke Scare" in hushed whispers all over Blogsphere in the past couple of days, but the oddest thing is how few people have had anything to say about it, or even linked to any story describing the situation. USS Clueless had nothing to say. InstaPundit was going to remain silent, but today linked to Lileks, who in yesterday's Bleat nodded grimly at the nightmare scenario in a poetic and speculative postscript; it wasn't until I went out specifically searching for details that I found out what exactly he'd meant by "It's been October every day since October. And it's going to be October for some time, right up until the day it's September again."

Reading this stuff puts me back into that state of mind I was in in the late weeks of September-- watching the profiles of airplanes coming in for landings at San Jose International, seeing whether they had that telltale outline with wings askew, signifying a frantic but determined bank-turn; helplessly reloading the news sites to see whether suddenly anything had happened to turn cnn.com into an ad-less, link-less, layout-less list of hastily typed facts-of-the-moment; keeping an uneasy eye on the sky out the window, half expecting the low clouds to suddenly go red with flashing, diffused light reflected from some out-of-frame explosion, the sound of which might not even reach me before the shock wave does.

But at least that's tempered by the rational human mind, the one that says that the time when this was hot was mid-October, not today. Five months ago. Back when companies were still taking out full-page ads to express their condolences. Back when the freeway overpasses were completely covered with homemade banners commemorating the dead and exhorting the nation to gather strength. Back when the ruins were still smoking.

The news of the scare was released this weekend because to release it any earlier would have been stupid. You don't go blabbing in internationally-acclaimed newsmagazines the extent of our intelligence on potential threats and our ability (or inability) to counter them. The very fact that the Ridge office has seen fit to release this information should be reassuring-- it means that they consider the threat to be so stale and discredited by now as to be a non-issue. Sure, it goes without saying that we're going to be more uneasy now knowing these things than we were a week ago before knowing them, but imagine how New York's streets might have looked if this story had been leaked on October 10.

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© Brian Tiemann